The Coal Kingdoms, 8900 to 4500, an Overview
The Coal Kingdoms, 8900 to 4500, an Overview The rise of the coal kingdoms was, in many ways, a natural outcome of the agricultural revolutions of the Middle Human Era. It is estimated that in the Early Human Ear, roughly 36,000 to 18,000 years ago, human populations in Antarctica had been roughly one million or less. And this had been a population under severe stress, facing seasonal famines, enduring periodic local collapses. The development of agriculture and animal domestication for food and labour between 18,000 and 8,000 years ago was transformative. Despite slow progress, and many reverses and collapses, plant and animal domestication, and the accumulation of techniques and technologies for producing and storing food rescued humanity from regular cycles of famine and collapse. But with this came a population explosion. At its height in the late stages of the middle era, some put estimates of the human population in Antarctica anywhere between ten and twenty million. But having escaped the food bottleneck, the human population of the middle era increasingly found itself confronted with a second bottleneck - Energy. Essentially, during the cold winter night, lasting almost half a hear, life ceased. Plant biology shut down, most animals hibernated or hid, with only a handful of large predators, scavengers and herbivores active. Temperatures would reach lows of minus 50 celsius and stay there for protracted periods. It was the lethal cold that had wrought such damage on human populations in the Early Human Era. Not only had game and food become extremely scarce, but in these brutal temperatures, hunting had become completely impossible. Instead, humans had spent months, huddling in their shelters, slowly freezing or starving to death. In the early human era, humans had built shelters or dwelling places, packed and insulated them, had huddled together for body heat and maintained fires through the winter. These fires in turn had been used to cook and prepare food, melt water, to store and preserve food, and to undertake a number of activities. Fire was the essential tool of winter survival. With increased populations and more complex societies emerging in the middle human era, it became more difficult to conserve heat. Huddling together or building communal nests worked for a a band of half a dozen. Communities of dozens or hundreds, with discrete food storage or animal sheltering areas found it more difficult to preserve heat traditionally. Fire became more important, more critical. Larger populations, on the other hand, created massive local needs for fire, and for fuel. Typically wood, this placed major demands on local wood sources, resulting in patterns of deforestation and collapse. In this situation, Tsalal societies literally cried out for a fuel source which would not exhaust in a season or two. The solution was coal. Coal was not, of course, the only solution. The Yag spent winter burning the stalks of their major crops. The Zhudan mined the peat deposits around the sea of frost. The Ptahr maintained an intimacy with their Shaghui that verged on perversion. Peoples in volcanic or geologically active areas learned to make use of hot springs or geothermal heat. Over time, sunken cities modes of architecture, and small heat animals were developed. Coal, however, was the key. It could store indefinitely, was extremely portable, and to the stone age culture of the era, was practically infinite in supply. On the other hand, coal supplies were not universally or evenly distributed. And, once the surface outcrops had been picked clean, extracting coal required increasing labour and specialization. At first, coal deposits were subject to wars and violence between primitive communities, as they struggled to control the resource. However, this was succeeded, fairly rapidly by the development of trading networks in which coal complexes exchanged fuel with other communities for food, meat, leather, wood and flint. Trading networks evolved into, or were sometimes replaced by political dominance. With assured supplies of food and goods from other communities, with control of a vital resource, coal complexes tended to grow significantly larger than agricultural communities. They had more population, and healthier more well fed populations. They gave rise to more warriors, attracted more wealth, had more specialized trades. Coal extraction could be done year round, and was often carried out in the winter night. Denial of coal to a community could spell death by freezing, or at least a great deal of misery. The first Coal Kingdom was the Tcho-Tsui Coal Complex, now half legendary, which endured for almost a thousand years before the exhaustion of its coal reserves. The Tcho-Tsui complex mined and supplied coal to dozens of communities, through incremental deliveries via winter sleds. It pioneered early coal extraction technology, notably pit digging and labour draughts. The Tcho-Tsui complex shows evidence of foodstuffs and artifacts drawn from as far away as the Azul states. Approximately, numerical symbols and records appear early in Tcho-Tsui history, along with symbols. But approximately five hundred years in, a written script appears, rough but fully formed. It is believed that the Tcho-Tsui obtained the idea of writing from the Azul, who themselves had obtained it from the Yag, and then applied it to their developing symbol lexicon. Originally, Tcho-Tsui script appeared on cylinders, as with Yag and Azul, but soon switched to flat rectangular pages. Some of the first true sunken cities appear in the Tcho-Tsui era, as well as the first formal roads. Bridges and other architectural works were constructed. Again, likely derived from Yag, we begin to see evidence of limited water engineering works for agriculture. Towards the end of the Tcho-Tsui era, we even begin to see wheeled carts. The last centuries of Tcho-Tsui were marked by severely declining coal output. Engineers and warriors from Tcho-Tsui went searching, either as refugees or as a deliberate plan, new sources of coal. This lead to the establishment of the four Coal Kingdoms, Tcho-Tcho, Nat, Ole and Mri who dominated much of the history of the Coal Age. There are a number of incorrect beliefs about the Coal Kingdoms. It should be noted that these were not the only coal complexes of the Coal Age. Archeologists have recorded as many as thirty worked deposits and complexes throughout the Tsalmothua, and out as far as Wang Gash and Azul. Nor were the four kingdoms all in continous operation throughout the Coal Age. Rather, the production of each of them varied markedly, with each having periods of drop, and some of them apparently shutting down completely for centuries before technological innovation allowed untapped supplies to be accessed again. At no point did the Coal Kingdoms rule over the whole of Tsalmothua. At best, their collective areas of maximum geographical domination might all together extend to perhaps a quarter or a third of Tsalmothua at any particular time, though their trading networks, and the movement of goods and cultural influence extended much further, even into Azul, Wang Gash and the islands. It should be noted, however, that the Coal Kingdoms areas tended to be more densely populated than disorganized territories, and the people within the ambit of the coal kingdoms, as a whole, tended to live longer and eat better. The Coal Kingdoms ruled over as much as a third to a half of the population of Tsalmothua. Nor were they geographically contiguous, though some overlapped. Ole, for example, was geographically remote from the others, being located near the Sea of Frost, though retaining much of the same technology and cultural traits. Although there were periods of union, the Coal Kingdoms were often decentralized, disinterested and occasionally warring upon each other, and enduring rebellions from their fiefdoms, or invasions from beyond their borders. Nor were they the only societies in the Tsalmothua. There were a number of secondary cultures, often mapping themselves on the examples of the coal kings - including the Charcoal Kings, and the Dung Lords. Most of these societies, however, were highly local, often transient, and had difficulty attaining the cultural heights of the coal kingdoms. Nevertheless, the Coal Kingdoms stand as a remarkable institution. The Coal Kingdoms essentially represented a homogenous culture of language and traditions, crossing borders and millenia, with a remarkable degree of coherence and conformity. Local differences did evolve, and gradual innovation took place. But innovations in one Coal Kingdom would gradually percolate up and down through other Kingdoms, so that the cultural complex as a whole tended to evolve as a single unit, or as a stream of related units.